...4Behavioral and Biological Convergence ...

...The concept of brain health involves our ability to safely and successfully navigate the world around us, and attention is a major cognitive process underpinning this ability. (Monica Rosenberg) ...

... approaches will help to move functional magnetic resonance imaging from a science of group averages—meaning, elucidating what happens in the brain on average when people pay attention—toward a science of individual differences. (Monica Rosenberg) ...

...Going forward in research, it will be important to characterize the brain signatures of different types of attention without assuming that “more is always better.” (Monica Rosenberg) ...

...The concept of resilience refers to the ability of most people, when exposed even to extraordinary levels of stress and trauma, to maintain normal psychological and physical functioning and avoid serious mental illness. (Elizabeth Hoge) ...

...Several strategies can be used to measure resilience in humans: (1) examining people who have experienced adversity, stress, or trauma and then function well later; (2) bringing ...

...people into the laboratory, stressing them, and then measuring their ability to cope; or (3) administering self-report questionnaires. The third strategy is the most commonly used to measure ... in the available literature. There is a need to move the field toward validating these commonly used pencil-and-paper measures against some kind of behavioral measures. (Elizabeth Hoge) ...

...In the context of defining resilience, it is important to consider how long a negative reaction persists; the memory of positive versus negative experiences could be used as one potential measure of resilience. (Huda Akil) ...

...Resilience relates to the capacity to cope with stress. A person experiencing bad stress may feel overwhelmed and lacking in the resources to cope, while a person experiencing good stress believes they have the resources to cope with it. Resilience could thus be ... by a person’s belief in his or her ability to cope and succeed in the face of stress without negative mental or physical health outcomes. Within this paradigm, it could be useful to help people transform ... stress into good stress, so they feel more confident and capable without being preoccupied by their past mistakes. (Elizabeth Hoge) ...

...It is likely that the brain has multiple capacities and systems that are related to resilience. Striving for a single unifying definition of resilience—in the service of identifying specific ...

...The most difficult step in research on the brain and cognitive processes related to resilience is to identify whether a given brain phenomenon is a risk factor or a response. Differentiating between the ... , while challenging, is critical for characterizing the brain’s response to stress and how to manage it to improve long-term outcomes. (Damien Fair) ...

...From a research perspective, it is useful to consider the potential distinction between emotional and cognitive resilience. Cognitive resilience could be described as a system that is perturbed by some life event, but the system is still able to ...

...Because of the difficulty in defining concepts of resilience, stress, and brain health, multimodal measures are important, such as measuring self-reported emotion over time in addition to adrenocorticotropic hormone or ...

...This chapter focuses on behavioral and biological convergence in brain health. Presenters and panelists discussed the connections and discontinuities between brain activity and behavior as well as those between psychological health and brain health. They examined what behavior and ... experience may suggest about brain health and resilience. The biological underpinnings of behavior in the context of cognition, emotion, and psychiatric disorders were also explored. Monica Rosenberg, assistant professor in the department of psychology at the University of Chicago, ... an overview of the neural correlates of attention and cognition. Elizabeth Hoge, director of the anxiety disorders research program at the Georgetown University Medical Center, considered the question of ... meditation can improve health and resilience. ...

...NEURAL CORRELATES OF ATTENTION AND COGNITION ...

.... It is important for life outcomes across development (e.g., children who pay better attention have better educational outcomes during their school years). However, the ability to pay attention varies across different people; the ability also varies in the same person over time. Attention lapses ...

...Functional Brain Connectivity ...

...Many psychological tasks, questionnaires, and clinical measures can be used to measure differences in attention between people and within people. Rosenberg proposed that brain measures can be used to complement these behavioral measures of attention, focusing on the role of ... the scan, brain activity is divided into several hundred regions or nodes. Researchers can then look at the activity signal time course in one node and correlate it with a single time course in every other node, generating a whole-brain connectivity matrix or connectome. In the matrix shown in Figure ... -1, the rows and columns represent distinct brain regions; cells represent the correlation between activity in those regions. The matrix can then be projected back ...

... has a unique pattern of functional brain connectivity, a “functional connectivity fingerprint,” that is relatively stable over time and contains information about cognitive abilities (Finn et al., 2015; Miranda-Dominguez et al., 2014), including fluid intelligence, which can be used ... predict attention and other abilities. She emphasized that more broadly, these types of predictive modeling approaches will help to move fMRI from a science of group ... . This could potentially enable a single brain scan to provide specific information about an individual person’s brain, abilities, outcomes, and most appropriate treatments or ...

...FIGURE 4-1 Measuring functional brain connectivity.SOURCE: Adapted from figures presented by Monica Rosenberg at the workshop Brain Health Across the Life Span on September 24, 2019. ...

...interventions. However, care must be taken to test model generalizability, to control for confounds, and to ensure that predictions are robust and meaningful. ...

...Use of Brain-Based Models to Predict Attentional Abilities ...

... abilities (Shen et al., 2017). Connectome-based predictive modeling was used to capture individual differences in sustained attention in adulthood and to capture real-world attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms in a cognitively developing population (Rosenberg et al., 2016a). An ...

...The first step in connectome-based predictive modeling is to identify which of the tens of thousands of functional connections in the whole-brain pattern are related to the behavioral measure of interest. To do so, investigators leave out data from ... single subject and correlate the strength of every connection with behavior across the remaining subjects, generating a matrix that indicates the relationship between ... strength of a functional connection and behavior across individuals. Researchers then retain the connections that are most strongly related to behavior in the positive and the negative ...

... at the degree to which each participant expresses the network overall—by summing up the functional connection strengths in the network—and relating that to behavior. Models are validated by applying them to data from previously unseen individuals to generate behavioral predictions. ...

...SOURCE: As presented by Monica Rosenberg at the workshop Brain Health Across the Life Span on September 24, 2019. ...

... individual differences in sustained attention in adults, the researchers used a gradual-onset continuous performance task (Esterman et al., 2013). Brain imaging data were collected from 25 healthy adults while they were performing a challenging task requiring continuous, sustained attention. In ... to measures of whole-brain functional connectivity, task performance was also measured for each subject. The aim was to use the functional connectivity patterns to predict task ...

... the low-attention network more strongly would perform worse. The analysis procedure guarantees that the features are actually predicting attention, and they are not simply related to the selected measure by chance. Specifically, the investigators leave out data from a single subject and correlate the ... with behavior across the remaining subjects, generating a matrix that indicates the relationship between the strength of a functional connection and behavior across individuals. Data from the left-out person are then brought back into the model to see how strongly the person expressed the networks....

... into account strength in both networks.2 Next, her group applied the models to data collected while participants were just resting in the scanner and not doing any task. The aim was to compare these rest predictions with the task predictions to determine whether subjects needed to perform an ...

... 1 The code associated with this technique, visualization tools, and a detailed protocol are available online at github.com/YaleMRRC/CPM (accessed November 3, 2019)....

... 2 They are now exploring the possibility that the high- and low-attention network models may be providing some degree of redundant information....

...whether the functional architecture of attention is reflected in the brain while a person is lying in the scanner looking at a fixation cross on the screen. Rest data were also able to predict performance. ...

...’ performance based only on their functional connectivity patterns observed at rest. Figure 4-2 depicts plots of the prediction from task data and from rest data. Rosenberg suggested that task predictions are better than the rest predictions because engaging in the attention task perturbs ...

...Predicting Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Symptoms in Children and Adolescents ...

...FIGURE 4-2 Predicting task performance based on functional connectivity patterns.SOURCES: As presented by Monica Rosenberg at the workshop Brain Health Across the Life Span on September 24, 2019; Rosenberg et al., 2016a. ...

... context—publicly available data3 from children and adolescents with ADHD.4 For each child, there was a resting-state functional connectivity pattern and a measure of ADHD symptoms rated by clinicians ... diagnosis, as well as for children who did not have a diagnosis, so they were predicting continuous measures of symptom severity in both patients and controls....

... Rosenberg’s group plotted the severity of ADHD symptoms on the x-axis (with higher scores indicating more frequent or more severe symptoms) and predicted task performance on the y-axis. When they predicted that a child or adolescent would perform well on the task, the subject showed fewer ...

... the model was specifically predicting abilities related to attention as opposed to, for example, predicting the ability to comply with instruction and to be high functioning overall, her team analyzed whether the predictions were related to ADHD scores when controlling for intelligence quotient (IQ); ... were not related to IQ scores when controlling for ADHD scores. These predictions are general, in that they are generalizing across datasets and across measures of sustained attention and across age groups. However, the predictions are also specific, in that they are predicting scores ...

... High- and Low-Attention Network Anatomies...

... Rosenberg explained that data-driven predictive approaches can inform the functional architecture of attention and cognition. Specifically, she presented data to illustrate the anatomy of high- and low-attention data-driven networks in the brain (Rosenberg et al., ... , 2017). In summary, she showed that brain regions (or nodes) can be characterized by how many connections they have in both high- and low-attention networks, and the proportion of connections in each. Together, these connections...

... 4 From the ADHD 200 dataset and data collected in China from 113 children and adolescents aged 8–13 years....

... in high- and low-attention networks only represent about 4 percent of all possible functional connections in the networks. Some nodes are highly specialized in ... network or the other, whereas other nodes have approximately equal numbers of connections in the network predicting better attention and the network predicting worse attention. She emphasized that when predicting differences in attention, the functional connectivity measure is ...

... Using Brain-Based Models to Capture Changes in Attention Over Time...

.... Emerging evidence suggests that some connectome-based models are capturing changes in attention within a single person; this has been documented and suggested in the literature (Adam et al., 2015, 2018; Christoff et al., 2009; Cohen and Maunsell, 2011; deBettencourt et al., 2018; Esterman et al., ... task while being scanned by fMRI at 30 different time points over 11 months (Salehi et al., 2020). This yielded a functional connectivity matrix and task performance assessment from each of the 30 sessions. The task performance at each session was plotted against the model’s prediction of ... was only sensitive to the person’s average attentional ability, no relationships between changes in this connectivity signature of attention and changes in behavior would be expected, but the model was actually sensitive to the person’s best session and worst session. It was also very ...

... Use of Brain-Based Models to Capture Changes in Attention Caused by Pharmacological Interaction...

... of methylphenidate or no drug at all (Farr et al., 2014a,b; Rosenberg et al., 2016b). Methylphenidate is a common ADHD treatment that blocks dopamine and/or epinephrine reuptake (Berridge et al., 2006; Spencer et al., 2015; Volkow et al., 2001). It is very effective, providing symptom improvement in ... (Greenhill et al., 2002); performance enhancements are also seen even in participants who are not diagnosed with ADHD. Investigators examined high- and low-attention network strength in a group of adults given a single dose of methylphenidate before the scan—as expected, individuals given the ... signatures of better attention. That is, participants who had been administered methylphenidate showed higher high-attention network strength and lower low-attention network strength than control participants who received no medication. This indicates that methylphenidate is not just having an ... the functional connections related to attentional abilities. The same pattern was observed both when people were performing a stop-signal task and when they were simply resting. This set of studies suggests that the same models that predict individual differences in attention are also capturing ...

... Beyond characterizing individual differences in sustained attention, these functional connectivity patterns and predictive modeling methods can also be used to capture individual differences in a number of different abilities, behaviors, or clinical symptoms ( ... , these patterns can be used to predict aspects of adult working-memory function (Avery et al., 2020), adult fluid intelligence (Finn et al., 2015), and autism symptoms (Lake et al., 2019). Work is ongoing across many research groups to share and validate functional connectivity biomarkers and ... the degree to which they generalize across datasets. “If we really want to move toward an individualized translational neuroscience and applications, we need to confirm that our models generalize beyond the single dataset on which they are built,” Rosenberg noted....

... Use of Brain-Based Models to Characterize Working Memory in Development...

... Rosenberg explained how a different type of brain measure and brain-based predictive model is being used to characterize working memory in developmental periods such as childhood and adolescence. Working memory ... a critical cognitive ability related to processing speed, fluid intelligence, and attention that allows a person to store and manipulate information in the mind (Baddeley, 1992; Kane and Engle, 2002). Like attention, working memory varies significantly between individuals ... development (Klingberg et al., 2002). Previous work suggests that these differences are supported by frontoparietal circuitry in the brain (Darki and Klingberg, 2015; Klingberg et al., 2002; Palva et al., 2010; Satterthwaite et al., 2013). Mental disorders, including ADHD, anxiety and mood ... , schizophrenia, and substance abuse, tend to emerge and peak during adolescence (Lee et al., 2014). The ability to predict symptoms and abilities earlier in development (prior to adulthood) could offer greater opportunities to intervene earlier and to afford people improved outcomes....

... Relationships Between Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Activity and Working Memory...

... To that end, initiatives like the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD) are collecting and sharing large developmental datasets with MRI data, as well as providing resources to train and test predictive models (Rosenberg et al., 2018). ...

... Such differences are not seen with brain activation in other contexts, such as activation during emotional versus neutral face blocks of the emotional n-back task. Similarly, no differences ...

... 5 A task in which participants are presented several stimuli in a row, and then asked to determine whether the current stimulus is the same as a stimulus shown two steps earlier....

... collected during an inhibitory control task (stop-signal task) or a reward processing task (monetary incentive delay task). This suggests that 9- and 10-year-olds with stronger working memories do not simply have greater engagement of frontoparietal circuitry overall in any challenging context. ... tests for elucidating individual differences in brain activity related to behavior. Brain-related differences are observed in children with stronger and weaker working memories when they are given an explicit working-memory challenge but not in the other contexts tested....

... Huda Akil, codirector and research professor of the Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute and Quarton Professor of Neurosciences at the University of Michigan, asked for clarification about how it was possible to pick up changes in sustained ... over time and with treatment, given the lack of sufficient continuity to make predictions without the person actually doing the task. She also asked whether ... as well as to capture the person’s mean or average of attentional focus in a variety of contexts. Factors like motivation, context, sleep, and caffeine all influence whether the person will achieve the maximum or minimum level of focus that fluctuates around that day-to-day average. The ...

... these state-like versus trait-like effects. Evidence suggests that this functional connectivity fingerprint is relatively stable across development and over time, but it can be altered to some degree by task states, cognitive states, and pharmacological states. Akil added that this raises ethical ...

... Martha Snyder Taggart, science writer and staff member at BrightFocus Health, asked Rosenberg if her team had observed any subjects with cross-correlated thinking types, such as creativity, ... have more tendencies to integrate against attention. Rosenberg replied that they have not looked at the relationship between those types of factors and attention, but they have investigated the relationship between functional connectivity in general with personality traits and creativity. Her team ...

... A participant asked if the relationship between circadian rhythms and attention or reaction times has been explored. Rosenberg responded that her lab has not studied it directly, but they have found that their ... are not related to time of day. However, attention can fluctuate minute by minute and hour by hour, so it could be informative to capture data from an individual at multiple time points in a specific day. Another participant remarked ...

... ROLE OF MEDITATION IN IMPROVING BRAIN HEALTH AND RESILIENCE...

... Elizabeth Hoge discussed brain health and resilience in the context of research on meditation, a practice that is becoming increasingly popular and which is thought to confer health benefits. Her presentation was framed around how meditation training may improve brain health and resilience, with ...

... Effect of Meditation on Brain Structure...

... the cortex of meditators (Lazar et al., 2005). The study included 20 experienced meditators with an average of 9 years of daily meditation practice and 15 nonmeditating controls matched on age, sex, race, and education. The structural MRI showed several areas of significantly increased cortical ...

... Specifically, the brain areas of higher density in meditators were the insula and the prefrontal cortex. The insula is associated with interoception—or increased awareness of the body—which is in keeping with the aim of ... meditation practices of paying attention to what is happening in the body. The insula is associated with the integration of sensory and emotional information as well as empathy and compassion; this area is also more active during compassion meditation (Lutz et al., 2008). The insula ...

... in people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. The prefrontal cortex is associated with working memory, executive function, selective attention, and fluid intelligence. Plotting the age of the study participants revealed that control subjects had a standard decline in cortical thickness that would ...

... Another study looked at experienced yoga practitioners, meditators, and controls (Gard et al., 2014). The subjects’ fluid intelligence was measured by Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices. When the subjects&# ... their ages, the typical decline of fluid intelligence with increased age was seen in the control subjects, with less decline among the meditators and experienced yoga practitioners. These studies suggest that there is a protective element to these practices, said Hoge. She noted that this is ... with the ethos of the meditation tradition, which is designed to see reality more clearly and therefore help humans reach happiness and joy....

... of meditation on resilience. The dictionary defines resilience as the ability to return to original shape after being stretched, pressed, bent, and so on, as well as recovering from and adjusting well to misfortune or change. In psychology, the concept of resilience refers to the ability of most ... , when exposed even to extraordinary levels of stress and trauma, to maintain normal psychological and physical functioning and avoid serious mental illness (Russo et al., 2012)....

... Several strategies can be used to measure resilience in humans: (1) examining people who have experienced adversity, stress, or trauma and then function well later; (2) bringing people into the laboratory, stressing them, and then measuring their ability to cope; or (3) administering ... of the subjects measured resilience in terms of mental or physical health outcomes after adversity; three-quarters measured resilience using pencil-and-paper self-report questionnaires. This is a concern, she said, because the latter strategy has never been validated...

... These questionnaires, which typically are based on resilience scales constructed by psychometricians, are often used to evaluate the putative and vaguely defined construct of resilience related to the outcome of behavioral or pharmacological interventions. For example, one study concluded that ... with tiagabine, fluoxetine, sertraline, and cognitive behavioral therapy improves resilience as measured by a self-administered questionnaire (Davidson et al., 2005). This underscores the ... related to measurement and reporting of resilience and the need to move the field toward validating these commonly used pencil-and-paper measures against some kind of behavioral measure....

... Effect of Mindfulness Meditation on Resilience...

... with a focus on self-regulating one’s attention—meaning, maintaining focus on the immediate experience of sensations, emotions, and thoughts in the present moment—and on adopting a particular orientation toward one’s experiences in the present moment, which is ... by curiosity, openness, and acceptance (Bishop et al., 2004)....

... in people with generalized anxiety disorder (Hoge et al., 2013a). See Box 4-2 for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) criteria for this disorder. The study design randomized about 90 participants either to a mindfulness-based stress reduction class or to an ...

...And three of these: ...

...Difficulty concentrating or mind going blank ...

...Stress Test twice, once prior to any intervention and 10 weeks later after the intervention. ...

... anxiety during the second test, it could mean that they are more resilient to stress after the mindfulness-based stress reduction class. Both before and after the intervention, participants also completed a questionnaire composed of self-statements during public speaking; they were asked the extent to ... they agreed with different positive and negative statements about their speeches during the Trier test7 (Hofmann and Dibartolo, 2000). After the intervention, people in the meditation group had a greater decrease in negative self-statements, although it was not ... group compared to the controls, despite the fact that the meditation training did not specifically teach participants to encourage themselves and did not contain any training in how to deal with the speech task. She surmised that this finding suggests that there ...

...;I’m a loser”; “A failure in this situation would be more proof of my incapacity.” Example positive statements: “I can handle everything”; “This is an awkward situation but I can handle it.” ...

... The researchers looked at changes in the levels of stress hormones in the two groups before and after the training intervention. They focused on the adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) because it comes from the brain, unlike cortisol, and has a ... for greater temporal specificity. They assessed the two groups’ differences in ACTH levels in response to the Trier test administered prior to and after the intervention. People in the meditation group had a statistically significant decreased overall ACTH response compared to the people in the ...

... Effect of Mindfulness Training on the Biology of the Brain...

...., 2010; Mennin et al., 2002, 2005). People with this disorder tend to have low emotion regulation ability, as manifested in more negative reactivity and poorer understanding of emotion. However, psychotherapy can improve emotion regulation ability, which is thought to result from the involvement of ...

... Study participants with generalized anxiety disorder were randomized to receive either mindfulness-based stress reduction or the control training. Before and after the intervention, participants completed an fMRI ... participants’ fMRI responses to neutral facial expressions was of particular interest, because people with anxiety disorders tend to focus on and worry about the meaning of neutral or ambiguous information. The investigators carried out a functional connectivity analysis of the participants to ...

... Figure 4-3 illustrates how the changes that occurred as a result of the training were significantly different in the meditation group compared to the control group....

... Panel B depicts the right superior frontal area, which is associated with social exclusion, social pain, and pain catastrophizing. Panel A...

...FIGURE 4-3 Change in functional connectivity in patients with generalized anxiety disorder.NOTE: ACC = anterior cingulate cortex; MBSR = mindfulness-based stress reduction; SME = stress management education.SOURCES: As presented by Elizabeth Hoge at the workshop Brain Health Across the Life ...

... forms part of the salience network with the insula; this subgenual part of the anterior cingulate cortex is associated with emotional regulation and affective tasks. Panels C and D show the prefrontal cortex areas. Panel C indicates that the same area of the cortex is associated with two different& ... #8212;but perhaps related—phenomena: it was involved when people with generalized anxiety disorders learned meditation, and was also found to be of greater thickness in experienced meditators. Next, investigators correlated the participants’ Beck Anxiety Inventory ...

...., 2013b). Telomeres are caps at the ends of chromosomes that protect the tip of a chromosome from deterioration. They shorten with each replication and shorten predictably with age. According to cross-sectional data, telomere shortening appears to be accelerated in populations that experience ...

... Other-focused activities such as community volunteering (Oman et al., 1999) and spousal caregiving (Brown et al., 2009) can sometimes improve health. Forgiveness of others is associated with greater longevity (Toussaint et al., ... ), and people with high hostility levels have a higher risk of mortality (Smith et al., 2004). The researchers recruited long-term meditators with ... well as controls matched on any factor that could affect telomeres. As expected, the loving-kindness meditators had longer telomeres than their age- and gender-matched controls. Overall, this difference was not significant. However, when broken down by gender, loving-kindness meditators who were women ...

... Colleen McClung, professor of psychiatry and clinical and translational science at the University of Pittsburgh, asked if study participants with anxiety ever report that mindfulness is counterproductively ...

... It has been suggested that it is the luxury of having quiet time to oneself that makes meditation and mindfulness beneficial for some people, McClung added. The data suggest that more is happening in meditation than time to oneself, said Hoge. In her ...

.... Akil’s group ran a study that looked at the effect of emotion on memory. Participants included people with depression, people with anxiety and depression, and healthy controls. They administered the Trier Social Stress Test and measured neuroendocrine markers, including ACTH, then did a ... had better recall about their perceived failures in the arithmetic task, even though the group’s actual error rate was no different—and in some cases even better—than the control group, who hardly remembered the test at all....

... tended to manifest a flat stress response instead of the solid response observed in controls. Harkening back to the distinction between good stress and bad stress, she noted that a solid stress response that starts and ends swiftly is preferable to a “floppy” response that never really ...

... She suggested that memory of positive versus negative experiences could be used as one potential measure of resilience....

... PANEL DISCUSSION ON BEHAVIORAL AND BIOLOGICAL CONVERGENCE...

... their own research. Hoge replied that resilience relates to the capacity to cope with stress. A person experiencing bad stress may feel overwhelmed and lacking in the resources to cope, while a person experiencing good stress believes they have the resources to cope with it. Resilience could thus be ... by a person’s belief in his or her ability to cope and succeed in the face of stress without negative mental or physical health outcomes. Within this paradigm, it could be useful to help people transform ... stress into good stress so they feel more confident and capable without being preoccupied by their past mistakes. Rosenberg suggested thinking about resilience as it changes over time, because it seems to ...

... The most difficult step in research on the brain and cognitive processes is to identify whether a given brain phenomenon is a risk factor or a response, said Damien Fair, associate professor of ... neuroscience, associate professor of psychiatry, and associate scientist at the Advanced Imaging Research Center at the Oregon Health & Science University. Differentiating between the two, while ... , is critical for characterizing the brain’s response to stress and how to manage it to improve long-term outcomes....

... Gagan Wig, associate professor of behavioral and brain sciences at the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas, remarked that it might be useful to frame the discussion by ... a potential distinction between emotional and cognitive resilience. Cognitive resilience could be described as a system that is perturbed by some life event, but the system is still able to ...

... It would be interesting to explore the extent to which different types of resilience are separable and how they feed into each other, said Akil. This could help inform strategies to help people with a low capacity for one type of resilience and a ...

... has the capacity to change as a function of various kinds of inputs; finding ways to measure that type of resilience would allow for better understanding of the capacity of the brain to be resilient in different contexts....

... regard to breaking out multiple types of resilience, Lis Nielsen, chief of the Individual Behavioral Processes Branch of the Division of Behavioral and Social Research at the National Institute on Aging, remarked that resilience is not limited to a particular part of the brain or physiology. It is ... that the brain has multiple capacities and systems that are related to resilience. She was concerned that striving for a single unifying definition of resilience—in the service of ... has completely shifted, connections between reward circuits in the prefrontal cortex are altered, the balance of brain circuits has become tilted, and there is degradation of the support system at the biological level. When the symptoms of a brain disorder are this severe, it can be difficult to ... between affective, cognitive, attentional, and memory symptoms....

... Akil suggested that understanding more about the sequence of events that lead to severe brain disorders could help to elucidate critical points of intervention. This knowledge ... no single pattern of brain phenotypes or behavioral phenotypes can be used to achieve a healthy outcome or a healthy life, said Rosenberg (Holmes and Patrick, 2018). Instead, there are probably ways in which each person’s phenotypes are more and less optimal, but they can operate together to ...

...-report measures may be more suitable for assessing certain outcomes of resilient processing in response to an imposed stressor. For example, using experience sampling approaches to capture self-reported emotion over time—in parallel with measures that capture fluctuations in hormone levels or ...

...-based self-reports that are widely used. Rosenberg commented that a component of resilience—how a person feels about their own abilities to handle a stressful situation—might only be measurable via self-report. Self-report scales are confounded by social desirability, noted Hoge, which ...

... Brain Imaging Signatures of Attention...

... processes (e.g., sustained attention, spatial orienting, alerting, executive control). Thus, each person has a different pattern of abilities and of functional networks related to those abilities. No single pattern is necessarily best in all contexts, so attention needs to be adjusted and ... in a context-dependent way. For instance, the attentional demands of sitting in a lecture are very different than the attentional demands of navigating a dark forest at night. Being able to flexibly deploy attention is a skill in and of itself, Rosenberg added, so it is not always the ...

... Self-Awareness of Resilience and Other Brain Processes...

... of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience, and assistant professor at the Grossman Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, asked other participants if people need to be aware that they are resilient in order to be resilient—meaning, have meta-awareness ...

... or adversity. Fair said that people are not aware or cognizant of those types of dynamics in their own brains....

... in gathering evidence of what is happening in the brain—beyond a person’s awareness or consciousness—that could inform our understanding of our own health, vulnerability, and resilience toward achieving better well-being. She asked, “What are we missing, if we only look at ... and not look at the brain?” Rosenberg noted that people are not always aware of their own attention lapses, but they can be detected with fMRI. The ... field of real-time neurofeedback detects patterns in the brain related to certain processes and provides feedback to the person about that activity. Initial evidence suggests that this may be more effective than some behavioral interventions, ... brain function is very top down, noted Akil, but more Eastern philosophies, including meditation, have a more bottom-up way of looking at affective and cognitive control that is very autonomic, but also relates to immune function and peripheral input. She urged participants not to restrict their ...

... training. Brain imaging suggests that feelings are not being suppressed; instead, there was more connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala. Akil also highlighted the interaction between the cognitive and the affective—“Do we feel differently when we think differently, ... predict individual differences in emotional processing or emotional resilience, to explore whether there are networks that predict those processes, and, if so, to look at the degree to which they overlap with networks involved in cognitive and attentional processes....

... function—or the ability to “shift gears”—in terms of resilience. It will be important, albeit challenging, to measure the brain’s capacity for resilience, particularly in response to a given input or some genetic risk factor, said Fair. Rosenberg suggested a longitudinal ... : using a brain measure at baseline to predict an expected resilience outcome. Hoge was concerned that such an approach would not capture the “bouncing back&#...

... Gender Differences in Brain Disorders...

... Recent studies have shown that men and women with depression have almost opposite signatures in their brain, with different gene expression changes occurring in very different directions, ... McClung. It also appears as if the inflammatory processes of depression mainly occur in men and not necessarily in women, suggesting that there may be sex-based differences in brain disorders to be explored further. Hoge noted that a very ... research is that it has a bigger effect in women, although it is not clear why. Akil said that an important research question is to better understand the sex or other types of individual differences in the effect of brain diseases, in resilience, in coping styles, and in different affective ... , cognitive patterns, and attentional patterns. Ideally, the results would coalesce to reveal different “brain neurotypes” with respective features, ... , and functions. Certain neurotypes might make a person more responsive to meditation or to attention shifting in other ways, for example. A major ... , however, will be to unpack the heterogeneity in a way that is positive and does not fall back on prescriptive labeling that could potentially be damaging. Better biological markers would be helpful in reframing research ... to help people improve their resilience and well-being, Hoge added....